As has often been pointed out, if we look at the first Voynich “word” that appears on each page of the herbal part of the VM, we find that those words are unique, or appear elsewhere very rarely. It thus seems reasonable that the words may be the names of the plants depicted.

The GA was set up to find a set of n-Gram mappings that would convert a list of 111 Voynich first herbal words into Latin/English or Spanish. For this, dictionaries of Latin, English and Spanish herb/plant names were used.

The GA sought a mapping that would convert all the Voynich words for herbs/plants into as many valid plaintext (Spanish, English, Latin) words as possible. The best result was for a mixed English/Latin dictionary (see table): 31 of the 111 Voynich words were converted, about 30% success rate.

(One should never expect 100% success, due to missing names in the dictionary, transcription errors, missing n-Grams, incomplete n-Grams etc..)

The results are shown below in tabular form, together with Dana Scott’s and Edith Sherwood’s identification. The first column shows the folio in the VM, the second shows the first Voynich word on that folio. For the GA identification columns (3 and 4) the Voynich mapped word is shown, in quotation marks if not found in the associated dictionary, and in bold if found in the dictionary.

Note that, probably unsurprisingly, nowhere do the IDs from the GA in Spanish, English/Latin and Scott/Sherwood, agree! NOT YET, anyway 🙂

(What amuses me about about this mapping technique is that it tends to produce words that sound plausible in the target language. E.g. for f4r the Latin/English word “paptise” sounds like a valid word.)

A Caution

"Students who have approached the Voynich text from the point of view of the professional cryptanalyst have been led on at first by a deceptive surface appearance of simplicity, only to bog down sooner or later in an exasperating quagmire of paradoxes and enigmas that reveal themselves one by one as the analysis proceeds."
- Mary d'Imperio